What does shield people from the effects of misinformation is exposing them to small doses of misinformation, much like vaccines.

“Throwing more science at people isn’t the full answer to science denial,” Cook wrote. “It turns out the key to stopping science denial is to expose people to just a little bit of science denial.”

The distinctions between fake, false and misleading reports could be seen as ranges in degrees of being factual, across a spectrum of sorts.

Logged

Republic Act 8485 (Animal Welfare Act of 1998, Philippines), as amended and strengthened by House Bill 6893 of 2013--- violation means a maximum of P250,000 fine with a corresponding three-year jail term and a minimum of P30,000 fine and six months imprisonment

The fake story about Sen. Hontiveros defending the young men smoking weed is an outright fakery. Among the three types of fake news, it is farthest from verifiable fact: the video thumbnail was fabricated using an editing software, the supposed quote was fabricated, and no legitimate media outfit reported that the senator had defended the seven young men.

Reports that make false claims fall somewhere in the middle and compared with fakes, are more closely-linked to some real event, albeit still not supported by facts.

In May, a website called RESURGENT PH, right around the time the issue of amending the Philippines’ government structure was big news, falsely claimed that a survey by Pulse Asia, an independent polling agency, showed more Filipinos being open to federalism.

To support its claim, the website manipulated survey numbers by adding the figures of those in favor of federalism to those opposed but said they might be open to change some time in the future.

This conflicts with Pulse Asia’s own analysis of its survey data, saying that this shows the prevailing public sentiment to be “one of opposition to replacing the present unitary system of government with a federal one.”

The false report could have reached 14.9 million people on social media, Crowd Tangle analytics show, with the web traffic generated by known pro-Duterte Facebook personalities Thinking Pinoy, For the Motherland - Sass Rogando Sasot and Mocha Uson Blog.

The last pro-Duterte online space is run by former presidential communications assistant secretary Margaux Esther ‘Mocha’ Uson, who resigned from this post in October in preparation for seeking a party-list seat in the next year’s election for House of Representatives.

Misleading reports move closer to the facts, their twists and manipulations being subtler than fakes and false claims.

In June, a website called TRENDING TOPICS TODAY misled readers by publishing a story claiming that plunder charges had been filed against former president Benigno Aquino III and several other government officials for supposedly shipping gold bars worth billions of dollars to Thailand.

The plunder case indeed existed, but was filed more than a year ago, something the misleading report conveniently left out. Moreover, the case was already determined to have been based on a document that the Central Bank of the Philippines called “spurious.”

These deception strategies are not mutually exclusive, and have been used in various combinations by the creators of disinformation campaigns.

Knowing these categories help professional fact-checkers inoculate readers from disinformation by exposing them to disinformation techniques. Beyond this, they help readers develop fact-checking skills on their own.

For instance, online users who want to find out if a photo on their social media feed is fake, or if a video thumbnail has been manipulated, need to use methods like reverse image searching. Those who suspect that they have come across false online news or are being misled need to verify these by going to, and reviewing, primary sources of information.

Equipping users with these skills is crucial in the fight against disinformation, says Ming Kuok Lim, advisor for communication and information at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) office in Jakarta.

“Things like how to verify if a photo is real, how to verify if this information was published, when it’s purportedly published, techniques to check whether the metadata matches the actual date, Google reverse search, and learning to be critical between and reading between the lines” have become basic skills for using the internet and social media, Lim said in an interview.

“We can fix the user pool through more literacy education,” he added.

In September, UNESCO published a handbook for journalism education and training to address online disinformation.

In particular, the ability to verify the authenticity of videos would seem to be an important, if not necessary, skill, as more than half of disinformation that made the rounds online from April to October 2018 are in the said format.

Others rely on clickbait headlines that claim something explosive or important could be found if a user watches the corresponding video, and then roll out unedited hour-long clips or crudely spliced ones that do not bear these claims out.

These clips often feature people ranting against one political issue or another. One recurring personality of this type is a Duterte supporter called Dante Maravillas, who claims to be a reporter for, and owner of, Tarabangan Albay News Television.

Maravillas frequently posts videos of himself commenting on current political issues, and his views have repeatedly been twisted and taken to be factual by false reports, or are spliced with other clips.

Maravillas also appears to be a favorite source used by a YouTube channel called TOKHANG TV, which takes its name from the vernacular code for the Philippine National Police campaign against illegal drugs.

TOKHANG TV videos in turn appear to be a popular source of material for many websites sharing deceptive content. In fact, they were used in more than 20 fake, false or misleading posts over the April to October 2018 period that Vera Files’ analysis covered.

The popularity of YouTube videos in the manufacturing of online disinformation is not a surprise.

In September, the website Balita Online (News Online) published a false story claiming that the Magdalo group of soldiers led by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, which had staged mutinies in 2003 and 2007, was preparing for another coup.

The post carried a 10-minute clip, which was lifted from an almost two-hour Facebook Live video clip by Duterte promoter Maravillas, but provided no support to the claim against the supposed coup plotters. The video thumbnail was manipulated, splicing old photos from the foreign wire agencies Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.

Disinformation is a political exercise, says Aries Arugay, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines. The fact that most of his happens online, especially in Facebook, does not mean that its effects are limited only to consumers of social media.

“Facebook has a ripple effect,” Arugay explained, saying there is a certain “mysticism” around disinformation even for those who are not active on social media, but who have heard of such from others. “It’s like my father. Every time I hear him say ‘Oh, I heard that this was on Facebook. So it must be true.’ In a way, there’s some mysticism and that contributes to fake news,” he said.

The Duterte camp confirms that its use of social media strategies for the presidential campaign in 2016 set him apart from his opponents. These offered his election team a relatively less expensive mode of courting votes in a country where poll campaigns rely heavily on the ability to hold rallies crisscrossing this archipelago of 7,100 islands and to place expensive political ads in different media.

“We used social media because we did not have the money,” Nic Gabunada, who headed the social media campaign of Duterte, had told Vera Files in an earlier interview.

“I know there are shortcomings,” Gabunada said in response to accusations of online abuse and bullying that occurred during the 2016 election period. “Since this is a movement, you cannot control everybody.”

That proactive social media strategy paid off. Pledging to kill drug dealers and criminals, Duterte won the presidential vote with more than 16.6 million votes, edging out his closest rival by more than 6 million votes. But in the years since that victory, the social media campaigns around the President have not waned – and have in fact metamorphosed into a continual wave that defends and promotes him across social media spaces.

Arugay says the continuing presence and activity of social media networks supportive of the administration even after the elections could mean that their usefulness lies not only in getting votes. “The would-be government was not simply trying to win votes - they were trying to create a support constituency,” Aru gay said.

And, Arugay added, it appears once people have been roped into this constituency, online disinformation only fuels more of the same support such that “it’s path-dependent, there is no turning back.”

Explained Arugay: “Political mobilization is often driven by non-rational considerations more than rational ones.”

(This story was produced under the Southeast Asian Press Alliance 2018 Journalism Fellowship Program, supported by a grant from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR]. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of OHCHR.)